Features

Zoe Joblin

“Lungs is a love story,” say husband and wife production team Adrianne Roberts and Dean Hewison who are about to launch it's Wellington premiere. The play follows two people through the raw and intimate moments of their relationship. Written by British playwright Duncan Macmillan, Lungs has been performed to sold-out audiences internationally.

Roberts now heads the production company Show Pony but says she found herself drawn to the play whilst visiting the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2015 as a delegate for Creative New Zealand. She explains that in Lungs, she saw herself and her own relationship portrayed truthfully for the first time. Both Roberts and Hewison feel that the play is perfect for a Wellington audience in its politics and social values. It depicts a couple struggling with their own sense of responsibility, privilege, prejudice and personal desires in a modern, first-world context. The story starts with a discussion about whether or not they should have children together and weaves itself into the high and lows of one intimate, human connection.

Hewison describes Lungs as “the best play I have ever read.” Importing the play marks a new challenge for Hewison, who often directs his own work. He says that the novelty of directing Lungs has not been easy, but has provided an opportunity to explore the mysteries of a script alongside his performers. The seasoned cast - Aidee Walker (Outrageous Fortune) and Arthur Meek (Hilary Clinton/Young Lover) -- are the main event in Lungs. The story is told in a pared-back, naturalistic style through interactions between the two performers onstage, named “Man” and “Woman”. The playwright mandated minimal lighting, set and sound design, which Hewison appreciates as allowing space for the simple power of bodies and voices.

Roberts explains that part of what connected her to this play, among the three or four others she would see each day at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, was that the audience had to work hard to stay engaged. With this focus came a deep satisfaction – the audience are not called to be passive receivers of Lungs but to laugh and cry and disagree in communion with it.

Much like the characters they are bringing to the stage, Roberts and Hewison describe a desire to "make “good” decisions”. After attending the Women in Theatre Hui at Circa last month, the creators found themselves reflecting on what role they had to play in this group of theatre makers. In a climate where satisfying female roles are still relatively rare, Hewison describes Aidee Walker’s character “Woman”, as strong, complex and loveable. In addition to the roles onstage, Roberts and Hewison are proud to have a 50/50 gender split in their design, production and acting teams.

Hewison admits that the show is written from the perspective of young, straight, educated protagonists. He and Roberts have asked themselves what kind of an audience will come toLungs. They do not claim to be speaking for everyone, but they hope that audiences will connect with the honesty of the piece.

The questions of who we are as makers and who we are making for, are important to being an artist in New Zealand today. We live in a country that is challenging itself to meet the needs of colonised people: people who exist within cultural, ethnic, gender minorities and those who are generally underserved by the status quo. It is a challenge to know and to care if you are perpetuating this status quo, actively breaking it down or perhaps transcending it. Dean Hewison and Adrianne Roberts speak with excitement about sharing their production ofLungs. It is a play that has done for them what many theatre-makers hope their work will do: validate and challenge its audience. The human connection present in Macmillan’s story is a universally fascinating one, and is sure to touch Wellington audiences as it has done overseas.